John Gardner: Literary Outlaw

by Barry Silesky

For a decade--from 1973 to 1982--John Gardner was one of America's most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers.

Gardner's personal life was as chaotic as his writing life was prolific. At twenty, he married his cousin Joan, and after a long marriage that was both passionate and violent, left her for Liz Rosenberg, a student. Only a few years later, he left Rosenberg for another student, Susan Thornton. Famous for disregarding his own safety, he rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding.

Biographer Barry Silesky captures John Gardner's fabulously contradictory genius and his capacity to both dazzle and infuriate. He portrays Gardner as a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention and also as a man whose charisma drew students and devoted followers wherever he went. Amazingly, Gardner published twenty-nine books in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography. Twenty-one years after his death, his On Moral Fiction and The Art Of Fiction are still read and debated in MFA programs across the country.

This is a full-scale biography of a writer who was, for ten years, almost bigger than life. It lives up to its subject magnificently.

Genres: Biography, Literature

358 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2004

Reviews

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whatever happened to John Gardner? In the almost 30 years since his death, he seems to have vanished from the discussion. From what I can tell, his literary self-help books “On Becoming a Novelist” and “The Art of Fiction” and “On Moral Fiction” are still taught sometimes. But what of the novels? Except for “Grendel,” you don’t hear much. His greatest sales success, “The Sunlight Dialogues,” was a timely book but not a good one – even at the height of my Gardner obsession, I found it to be a terrible slog to get through. Nobody talks about it now, at least not the way they used to back when it was a go-to text for the 60s dialog between the establishment and the counterculture. What happened to “Nickel Mountain,” a gorgeous book, or so I thought last time I read it. Maybe it is…

I was once a Gardner obsessive. Twenty years ago, I read just about everything (prose, that is) Gardner wrote; he was for a number of years my favorite novelist. But he exists for me today as a kind of literary residue, more like a favorite childhood author than a part of my literary greatest hits (the way, say Chekov’s short stories are). Today I cannot recall what exactly it was about Gardner that made me take to him so. In fact, I confuse him, in a strange way, with all that Stephen King I read in high school. They are both vivid writers. They both spend a lot of time with the supernatural and a basic good vs. evil set up. To be sure, Gardner is more “literary” than King, but the older I get, the less I understand what exactly I mean by that. This is my own fault to a large extent – I have a terrible memory when it comes to what I’ve read. And in a general sense my attitude towards fiction in general has changed a lot – as the years go by I find that I don’t get a lot of my “news” (in the William Carlos Williams sense) from novels the way I used to. When I do, I am frequently disappointed. What happens is that I’ll read something astoundingly high-mindedly stupid like Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” and I find myself shunning “serious” novels for another six months and instead watching, with relief, Christopher Walkin in “The Dead Zone.” I know why I dislike McEwan’s book (see my GoodReads review), but I don’t know why Gardner hasn’t “stuck” with me. Now I’m guessing I’d find his work to be too “crafted” for my tastes, full of erudite monsters and monstrous heroes, his insistence on “moral fiction” too unambiguous, too sure of itself. I’ve become a mopey, W. G. Sebald kind of reader these days…

Well, Barry Silesky wrote a biography of John Gardner and it has deepened my unease and sense of vague disappointment. But before I ruminate on Gardner’s life and work and personal significance to me, here is my review of Silesky’s actual book, “John Gardner, Literary Outlaw”: it is workmanlike, if a bit crudely done. It is, for a literary biography, remarkably short (I think I mean that as a compliment, but I’m not sure – it is pretty sketchy in places). There’s nothing fancy about the book’s organization, and Silesky indulges in psycho-analysis and personality-interpretation for only short stretches, thank God. Silesky is a fan, so he is gentle with his subject, although I think he does a pretty fair job of reporting. The beginning is top-heavy with far too much ancestor-detail – aunts and uncles and grandparents and such – none of whom have much to do with Gardner’s actual life, so far as I could tell. Gardner’s books are discussed only intermittently, which is a pretty big problem in a literary biography. The writing is sometimes clunky and marred by clichés and patches of repetition. As with so many books you read these days, this one could have used a good editor. But I learned a lot of stuff from Silesky’s book, and I recommend it as a good quick biography of a compelling writer. It also brought to my attention a great hypocrisy at the center of Gardner’s professional life that I found very disappointing...

***

As it turns out, John Gardner was in many ways a novelist right out of central casting – by turns charming and an asshole, moody, and he drank too much. Emotionally incontinent and very, very energetic in a basic, organic way, he was also very smart and very articulate. His disorganization and short attention span was compensated for by maniacal bouts of focus and 17-hour stretches of writing. As his fame grew, he gave into his tendency to pontificate. His kind of outsized personality is very appealing to the young, especially in the Creative Writing Department; their adulation fed his vanity. Yet Gardner was haunted by a tragedy that is so awful and obvious that it could’ve come out of a bad novel – when he was ten, he was driving a tractor towing a cultipactor (or some such agricultural thing). His five-year-old brother Gilbert was sitting on the tow bar. The tractor jerked to a stop when it ran out of gas, Gilbert fell, the cultipactor kept going and crushed Gilbert to death. This tragedy caused Gardner to be wracked by constant guilt, so Silesky tells us. It also led to his on-going adult bad behavior, which lead to more guilt. Gardner was sometimes extravagant and candid in expressing his remorse, and yet he pretty much kept doing whatever he wanted anyway, leaving a swath to unhappy, upset people. But that goes for most of us to some extent, I suppose.

Well, whatever formed him, as an adult Gardner was a charismatic, difficult person to be around. He seemed to be absolutely sure of himself most of the time, and such confidence can be very appealing, although as with many such people, his emotions at any given moment become the same thing as truth. This leads to all sorts of contradictions and disasters. His romantic attachments were a mess. He treated women in a starkly manichean way, like two big fists with LOVE and HATE tattooed across the knuckles: hugely extravagant with his affection and attention when he wasn’t cheating on or slugging them. He started cheating on his first wife in the usual professorial way, by screwing around with his female students. He divorced his wife and married one of these students (literary/academic establishment stalactite Liz Rosenberg), divorced again, was engaged to another student when he died. You know, that 1970s-80s male professor’s writing workshop seraglio.

Being around Gardner was an on-going party, but I don’t envy his disasters, and his disasters were spectacular. Gardner’s first wife (and mother of his children) loathed him enough to hire an airplane to drop leaflets over the Breadloaf Conference that read in part: “Wanted for Fraud, Falsehood, Violation of Court Orders, Passing Bad Checks…John Gardner, author of such frauds as On Moral Fiction.” (p. 294). Joan was a difficult woman, as Silesky hints at, but she had her reasons for the aerial bombardment. The great thing about being the famous novelist on campus was that the Bread Loaf official sent out squads of eager undergraduates to gather up the leaflets before Gardner was exposed to them. (Oh how I wish one of these would turn up on eBay – I’d give you ten bucks for one of them).

Gardner’s personal life is none of my business, of course, but what might be my business is that all this bad behavior – and Gardner’s incredible selfishness – causes me to question that “moral fiction” tub Gardner long thumped. Yeah, any writer’s moral authority should come from the work itself. But Gardner liked to preach, and it is hard to take a long sermon from a clergyman who is screwing the church secretary and is three months behind on his child support payments. Silesky notes that Gardner tried to distance himself, and even substantially retract some things from “On Moral Fiction.” It seemed to have embarrassed him later on. But he never says how, exactly


***

But it wasn’t Gardner’s bad behavior, or his imperfect engagement with moral fiction that really disappointed me. It was the difference between the advice he dished out and his actual writer’s career. Gardner’s career was not at all what I expected – it was, actually, very, very typical for a “serious” novelist, which is to say it took place mostly in the university. He was born in 1933, and therefore was able to hit one of academia’s great demographic sweet spots – he was just enough older than the baby boomers that he could enter the university system as a professor just as the first of the baby boomers were flooding the undergraduate market. Which is to say there were a lot of jobs for professors out there – from the moment he matriculated, Gardner had little trouble getting hired (he was an adroit networker, despite making his share of enemies along the way). Furthermore, he got hired as a professor with very little by way of credentials – I thought his Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer stuff was an interest, not a profession, but early John Gardner positioned himself as a serious Anglo-Saxon scholar. But as Silesky hints at, Gardner was not really much of a scholar – one of his colleagues reports that he was shocked to find Gardner didn’t know either Anglo-Saxon or Middle English, which are sort of minimum requirements for the field. Although it seems he picked up languages later, it is hard to say to what extent—Silesky quotes Gardner claiming to know several languages, but this appears to have been an exaggeration (Gardner was fond of “tall tales,” or lying, as it is sometimes called). In terms of his novels, this doesn’t matter of course, but there is something kind of suspect about his scholarly credentials which makes me suspect the whole shebang. In academia, Gardner got by on shock of personality and the fact he was a very popular teacher rather than his scholarship.

In addition to the sketchy credentials, convincing charges of plagiarism dogged Gardner during his later years – in particular his “Life of Chaucer” contained significant sections lifted straight from unattributed sources. Silesky is far too much of a fan to belabor the point, but he does cover the topic, allowing Gardner to be saddened by the charges without really being able to refute them. That everything he wrote seem to come in such intense bursts, it is not surprising that he accidentally hoovered up other people’s prose. Nevertheless, the plagiarist ultimately faces one of two scenarios: he is either slovenly or a thief. Gardner never quite came out for either one. Most plagiarists don’t.


***

Okay, so Gardner was a professor with radical pretensions, so what? Why was I so irritated about this? Here’s why: Gardner’s own writing career does not in any way match the advice he gives to young writers in “On Becoming a Novelist.” What bothers me (and the reason for why I am belaboring Gardner’s career as an academic) is that Gardner, rather than starving as a young writer, made a very calculated rush to academia and career-mongering (really, the university is all Gardner ever did from the time he entered college at 17). Twenty years ago I’d read with real anxiety in “On Becoming a Novelist” about how to expect a writer’s long slog in poverty and obscurity, dogged by fears of failure and ridicule while trying to perfect his craft. Gardner’s advice meant a great deal to me then. They gave me confidence, his stay-the-course exhortations about not giving a crap about what other people say.

But now, thanks to Silesky’s biography, I see Gardner did what virtually all the successful “literary” fiction writers and poets do – he got ensconced in the university as soon as he could through the usual process of energetic and shrewd credential-gathering, hoop-jumping, log-rolling, and friend-cultivating. He was a full professor at age 25! The only time he was ever close to being on the skids financially was when he divorced his first wife. He never worked at the car wash, or third shift as a security guard, or as an advertising copywriter. I sort of wish he’d mentioned this in “On Becoming a Novelist” – and better yet, explained how he did it. How to write a grant, how apply for an academic job, how to cook a CV, how to schmooze. Had he not been a hypocrite, he should have been urging me to get an MFA and start making “friends.” Instead, I feel now as if I’d been urged to accept the starving-in-a-garret scenario by an absentee landlord with a trust fund.

Which is to say only an idiot or a fool would “become a novelist” the way John Gardner says to. Go ahead, ask me about being a fool. I’m an expert.

***

Gardner died young, but it appears he was a burnt-out case. For some months prior to his motorcycle crash, he’d gone into a heartbreaking slump that is never wholly explained. Something undermined his confidence. Maybe it was the bad reviews and poor sales of the turgid “Mikkelson’s Ghosts,” which would, he’d hoped, return him to a “Sunlight Dialogues” level of popularity and sales; maybe it was the drinking or his romantic woes. For whatever reason, his artist’s immune system collapsed, which made him susceptible to all sorts of viruses. The worst of these was politics. A sure sign of a writer’s declining strength, decay, and failure of imagination is when he substitutes politics for art; this happens all the time and it is always a disaster. To my considerable surprise, this happened to Gardner. Here is Silesky’s account of Gardner’s last Bread Loaf Conference, 1982:

“That summer, the powerful presences (sic) of poet Carolyn Forche and essayist Terrence Des Pres strongly influenced the gathering. Both of them addressed their work to the political issues seething in Latin America, and their ideas about the unacknowledged political dimensions of all writing came to the fore. John, looking for a new direction, was listening. At the same time, however, his resolve seemed to lead to a disconnection that concerned several there who knew him well. Says Robert Pack:

“The last summer he set out do what he’d done many times in the past, which was to get to the podium and improvise a lecture. And he had always been able to bring that off and do it brilliantly. But this particular summer, I think it was early in the morning, he went to give his lecture, and he just couldn’t bring it off. He couldn’t develop an argument, organize his materials there on the spot. I remember it was a very distressing performance, and many of us were aware that there was something wrong, that we had seen a kind of breakdown there. There was a kind of feeling of shock in the community, that something had short circuited in John.”

Word had circulated that he would say something very different in his lecture, and when he got to the podium that morning the little theater was full.

“I’m not going to do a lecture about literature,” he began, “because I’m not that interested in literature anymore. I’m not really interested in writing anymore. I’m sort of interested in politics now. I think that’s what all of us writers should be interested in now.” He went on to give a few examples of social injustices, concluding, “If you’re not writing politically, you’re not writing.”

After little more than fifteen minutes – of what was usually an hour lecture – he was done. He went on during the rest of the conference to talk when he could about the government’s role in world hunger and political circumstances generally. It (sic) was a subject he’d never much engaged, but his charismatic style always drew adherents, and listeners surrounded him. That he was looking for a new direction is clear.” (p. 314-315)

Despite Silesky’s typically labored prose here (the above is a pretty fair example) I was shocked by this. “I’m sort of interested in politics now…” from Garnder’s speech is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. All John Gardner lived for was art, so he told us, and to see him undermined by an establishment radical chic hack like Carolyn Forché was appalling. What a defeat! What about “moral” fiction – wasn’t that still one of humankind’s highest goals, etc. etc.? One can only hope that Gardner himself didn’t really believe in this academic-radical-political slop. But he sure talked the talk there at the end. Was this a temporary failure? Would he come back to real literature? Nobody knows because Gardner died in a motorcycle crash that September.

***

Of course Gardner’s bad advice, hypocrisy and personal catastrophes don’t mean anything if he wrote enduring novels and stories. Which is to say this is a pretty poor review. All novelists’ biographies are somewhat hampered by the fact that the reader has to take it on faith (presumably based on his own reading) that the novelist in question is worth reading about because he wrote great novels. Silesky, although clearly a fan of Gardner’s, does not give much indication just what exactly it is he likes about Gardner. My own reading is so far off in time and my own poor powers of retention that I couldn’t add much to the biographical narrative while I read.

In an effort to alleviate this problem, I did re-read “The Wreckage of Agathon” about a week ago, and I found it hard to put down, which is something, I guess. But there were cartoonish aspects to the book that displeased me, and that constant elbow-in-the-ribs Teller of Tales shtick that seems dated now. It was an okay book, but I was far from overwhelmed. But perhaps this is only my jaded sensibilities showing. Perhaps Gardner will endure. Time will tell, of course. Right now he is in that awkward spot all writers endure – even Melville, Hawthorne, and William Faulkner were eclipsed for a while.

But I am still miffed about his practical advice to writers, the advice he was far too shrewd and ambitious to follow himself.



***


P.S. Finally, this book presented another opportunity to add to my collection of Indiana University being incorrectly identified in books. There is a nice photo section in this book, the last one of which shows Gardner in his motorcycle jacket at IU in 1979 – this is correctly identified. (I want to mention this was the time when my friend the late Jerry Dillon Pratt met him – she told me he had the most intense eyes of any human being she’d ever met – they looked right through you. This is the closest I ever got to a meeting with John Gardner myself). Although the photo is correct, what isn’t is this bit from the text:

“Later that month, (John Gardner) was interviewed for the Wall Street Journal, and he traveled to the University of Indiana at Valparaiso…” (p. 253).

No! There’s no such thing as the University of Indiana. There just isn’t. What is puzzling is that there isn’t even an IU extension campus at Valparaiso. So I don’t know where he went.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

JOHN GARDNER: Literary Outlaw, Barry Silesky [2004]

"The theory I'm proposing says . . . that you create in the reader's mind a vivid and continuous dream. The reader sits down with his book just after breakfast, and immediately someone says, 'Hermione, aren't you coming to lunch?' One instant has passed although 200 pages have passed because the reader has been in a vivid and continuous dream, living a virtual life, making moral judgements in a virtual state." John Gardner

I don't even recall how or when exactly I discovered John Gardner. Although, since I believe 'October Light' was the first novel I ever read by him, and that was published in 1977 . . . well, I guess that answers my question. That was followed by 'Mickelsson's Ghosts' in 1982, after which time I went back to his earlier works, 'The Sunlight Dialogues,' 'Grendel,' 'The Resurrection,' and 'Nickel Mountain,' and since he was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after 'Mickelsson's Ghosts,' I'd exhausted his novel output. A biography of this man of boundless energy, medieval scholar, novelist, critic, gin lover, teacher, mentor, essayist, poet, womanizer, daredevil, flaunter of convention and authority, sometime arrogant boor and general troublemaker, was long overdue. Opinionated to the point of generating feuds with a number of literary peers – Barth, Updike, Heller, Mailer – though friends with Gass and Coover, he was always promoting his literary gospel of 'Moral Fiction.' He was particularly tough on the modernists, on the dark, pessimistic worldview of current literature. I don't ascribe to all of his literary criticism, but I do admire the man, his dedication to his art, always eager to help his friends and mentor young writers, his relentless push against mindless authority. I was truly sad when I learned that he'd died in a motorcycle accident near his home. Such a waste. After 'Mickelsson's Ghosts' I was anticipating what he might produce next. It's hard to be too critical of Barry Silesky's biography of Gardner – I'm just glad to have it (despite the unfortunate title), for I don't know of much else that's been written about the man. Silesky does an admirable job in sculpting the full man, as they say, warts'n-all. Hated by many (he sort of brought it on himself, I guess), Gardner's work sorrily neglected these days, he was a force of nature at one time. I can look past the foibles of the man because I love his work. And to me, that's what really matters. I've rambled a bit here and I guess I didn't say much about Silesky's book . . . it's good, I enjoyed it.

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was an incredible biography; it was informational, not sensational and made me want to pull out my Gardner books and start re-reading. If you are at all a Gardner fan, I suggest reading this book.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This biography was serviceable, cataloguing all that Gardner accomplished in his 49 years, and describing his outsize personality. Still, the writing seemed a bit flat for its subject.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

A real teacher, I suppose, can teach through any medium, even if he's dead.

John Gardner died at age 49 after a motorcycle accident about a year before his classic The Art of Fiction was published in 1983. It's basically Gardner's collected notes on the craft gathered with exercises. (As an aside: Gardner, as a writing teacher experimented with broadcasting his writing classes on TV, which seems to prefigure online instruction.)

About ten years later, a friend loaned me a copy of the book at a key time in my long apprenticeship as a writer (like most writers, even famous ones, there are moments I fear I'm a fraud, given my success as a fiction writer amounts to two short stories published online over eight years ago). I read it, absorbed it, worked through its exercises, some of the toughest exercises any writer could and should try.

Its still one of the best books on writing any writer could read, and I recommend it, as I recommend John Gardner: Literary Outlaw, the first fairly extensive general biography of Gardner ever published. The biography is absorbing, for the most part, a solid portrait of a writer as full of foibles and contradictions as he was genius for writing and teaching writing.

In many ways Gardner, or the image of himself that he portrayed publicly, and to most of those who knew him privately, was a model writer, wholly devoted to writing, to the craft; writing absorbed him. It was as much a state of being almost inseparable from the man, which is Silesky's theme throughout the biography. I suppose today much of Gardner's life as a writer falls into cliche: heavy drinking, womanizing, depressive (probably bipolar, given the envious bouts of energy Gardner seemed to possess, even after drinking astounding amounts of gin, etc.). And yet, it's sort of a cliche you, as a writer, want to aspire to. A life almost wholly devoted to writing and literature.

As far as Gardner being a literary outlaw: I suppose he was at the time his fame and stature grew in the late '70s and early '80s, or infamy as some might and did say with the publication of his On Moral Fiction, a polemic that pretty much slapped most of his contemporaries (Mailer, Updike, John Barth) in their, according to him, amoral faces.

In time, he would recant some of what he wrote in On Moral Fiction,and his novels (Grendel, Mickelsson's Ghosts, for instance)would seem to contradict his dismissing the fiction of fabulists and metafictionists, such as Barth, as basically crap that largely broke its promises to the reader of providing a profulent uninterrupted dream, and rather descended into cheap wordplay. (Although to this day, Barth's short story "Lost in the Funhouse" mostly makes me scratch my head and say WTF?)

At the time that I read On Moral Fiction, I loved it; back then, when I read it, my life had turned seemingly into an absurd existentialist vacuum. I viewed the book then as sort of a secular bible. And, I suppose, its urge toward attempting to write not didactic fiction, but fiction that challenges and moves toward transcendence rather than the Abyss, is still a driving force in my writing.

And it's not hard to believe Gardner reached such a transcendence in his own life, as Silesky suggests poignantly at the end of the biography, quoting one of Gardner's students who wrote after visiting the site in 1998 in Susquehanna, New York where Gardner crashed his motorcycle and died: "'In the mythology of death . . . one must cross the river; and there it was [the Susquehanna River]. All he had to do was get up, brush the grit off his trousers and step across.'"

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography explores the influences in Gardner’s life that affected his writing decisions. The book describes details of Gardner’s life that contributed to his idea development. One particularly interesting section discusses Gardner’s reactions to some of the book reviews of Grendel and the fame that Gardner gained from the novel. This book possesses a thorough bibliography that includes major works, short stories, and critical works.

[Mark Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cursed with a corny and fairly inaccurate title (Literary Lawgiver might have been more truthful), and stretches of less-than-enlightening minutiae about moving from town to town in search of cushy college jobs, this book's readership probably won't extend beyond serious Gardnerites and those fascinated by lists of professorships. If you're in this rarified minority, you'll be rewarded for your dedication with some fairly interesting, and a few truly strange, anecdotal nuggets. Apparently there was a very fuzzy line between where the novelist ended and his unwieldy characters began. By all accounts, it would have been great to have Gardner as a teacher, but being one of his wives would have been a kind of masochistic hell. Such are the charms of an alcoholic narcissist.

I remember being dimly aware of Gardner's novel Grendel when I was young, mostly due to the fact that I attended Alexander Central School and roared through most of my adolescent rites of passage in nearby Batavia, Gardner's hometown. Given that he was a local hero among English teachers, it's a scandal his books weren't required reading. It took a hip friend of mine to tell me about The Sunlight Dialogues, which I finally got around to reading a few years later while I was living in Europe and possibly feeling wistful about my roots. I'm still encouraged that that book, not to mention the brilliant Grendel, emerged from a mind raised in the same hinterland blend of shredded manure and stagnant intellectualism as mine.

Alas, despite all the overarching attempts in his lifetime to bully himself into the great-writer pantheon, Gardner appears to be steadily slipping into cultish obscurity. Not even the "new sincerity" movement, which is apparently a rebirth of Gardner's "moral" precepts, seems to have revived interest in him, probably due to lingering confusion about his use of the ever-unfashionable word "moral." At any rate, Gardner's novels (if not necessarily his polemical works) are still well worth reading and there are few more dead-on portrayals of the conservative malaise that infuses Western New York than The Sunlight Dialogues. (The setting of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions is allegedly inspired by Batavia as well.) I suspect his legend is just in a temporary slump, awaiting a Melville-like wave of rediscovery.

It may fall short of greatness as a literary biography (I would gladly have traded some of the academic tick-tock for more details on the novels and how they evolved), but this book is going to be an invaluable resource one day for the screenwriter willing to tackle one of America's great literary drunks. Discarded gin bottles, fight-or-flight marriages, all-night typing binges, macho blustering, a rebel's demise, it's all here. The Sunlight Man, Rated R.

[Cordelia Becker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like biographies. I am glad I read this I think Barry S. did a good job. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to read biographies of artists and writers. Frankly I think John Gardner was a brilliant, charismatic alcoholic. I wonder what he would have accomplished if he hadn't been such a god awful drunk. I never believe that thing that the alcoholism is what makes the artist great - I think they are great in spite of the disease. This isn't really a spoiler because you find this out right at the beginning: As a child John was partially responsible for the death of his younger brother...he never got over the guilt and horror of this. Very sad.

[Lee Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The parts that were interesting were really interesting. But there were a lot of parts where I found myself skimming. Most of all I enjoyed how much of John Gardner's life he used in his fiction.

[Steve]

O my...dreadful....